Meetings Your Colleagues Will Want to Attend

A meeting is called for all lawyers in your group or your firm for, say, 4:30 on any given Tuesday. If there are administrative people involved (CFO or COO) they’ll show up on time. You enter the room. The practice group leader who called the meeting is not there. Indeed there are no other lawyers there and it is 4:33. You can fit in another phone call so off you go to make the call and return. When a critical mass forms the meeting does get underway (by 5 if you’re lucky) and some lawyers have a file with them and some are reading e-mail on their PDA. If this sounds familiar
read on.

My colleague Gerry Riskin has asked our clients to rank the meeting experience in their firm from 1 to 10. 1 indicates that you attend meetings only out of a sense of obligation, if at all. You usually sneak in a file, check your e-mail and put your cell on vibrate so you won’t miss a call. 10 means “I love meetings in my firm. They are inspirational personally and professionally – wouldn’t miss one – arrive early – leave late.” If we observe the profession as a whole, the experience with meetings is somewhere between 1 and 3. How could it
be different?

by Karen MacKay, MBA, CHIC
President

Setting the Stage

If you want meetings that people want to attend
what can you do to make them more valuable
and meaningful to each of the individuals who
spend their valuable non-billabale time attending
them. We suggest the following:

Get the group together and ask "Are there any specific benefits that
we should be able to achieve, from
working together, as a group of
like minded individuals, pursuing a
common purpose that you couldn’t
achieve on your own?"

If the answer is yes, and in my
experience it will be, then allow your
group to identify the priorities. Allow
them to identify what is worthy of a
meeting and what is not.

What specific activities and agenda
items are important?

What specific activities are
necessarily discussed at a group
meeting?

What specific activities or agenda
items should we discard from the
meeting format and reduce to email
or some other form of
communication?

Contracting with your Group

Whether you are the group leader, a committee
chair or a lawyer who has agreed to handle the
administrative function of arranging and chairing
group meetings, your next challenge is to make a
commitment to the group.

If I commit to you that I will keep us
focused on what we have agreed is
important as a group will you attend and
participate in our meetings?

If I commit to you that I will begin
meetings on time and finish meetings
on time, will you attend and participate?

If I commit to you that I will review the
relevance of our meetings with you on
an ongoing basis, will you attend and
participate?

Getting Feedback from your Group

As important as it is to gain agreement as to the
focus of the group and your commitment to
keeping the group’s meetings on track, ongoing
feedback is necessary to ensure that your
meetings continue to provide benefit and value to
the individuals who attend and participate in
them.

Create a way to get that feedback.

Perhaps a
quarterly e-mail with three simple questions:

What are we doing in our group
meetings that are important and
should continue?

What are we doing in our group
meetings that are no longer relevant
and should be discontinued?

What are we not doing that we
should start doing in our group
meetings?

With that feedback you can fine tune the
meetings to keep them valuable to the
individuals involved.

Rules of Engagement

Doesn’t it make sense to have an agenda
distributed ahead of time so that participants can
prepare, at least in their minds, for the topics
being discussed?

Doesn’t it make sense to start meetings on time
and end them on time - particularly in a timedriven
business?

We have observed that meetings in law firms
seldom start on time and that “a phone call with
a client” or “finishing something for a client” is a
legitimate excuse for being late to any meeting in
any law firm. We suggest that you let the group
set the ground rules and with some humour set
the consequences for people who do not follow
the rules that the group has agreed upon with
respect to its meetings.

Creating an Action Orientation

Meetings fall into that vast abyss that consumes
your precious non-billable time and are the cause
of frustration with many lawyers in the firms we
have served. In the book First Among Equals written by my friends and colleagues Patrick J.
McKenna and David H. Maister, they cite a
comment from a client: “Our meetings are like
television soap operas. You can leave the group
for three months and return to pick up exactly
where you left off in the discussion, with no new
progress ever having been made.”

If you have
any influence over the meetings in your firm
make sure they have a purpose. Make sure that
your meetings are respectful of the highly
talented individuals who attend them. And
finally, make sure that they are a good use of
your valuable non-billable time and that of your
colleagues around the table. If not, send an email!